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Kay Ryan
| birth_place = San Jose, California, United States | occupation =Poet, Educator | nationality = American | period = 1970s-present | genre = Poetry | subject = | movement = | notableworks = The Best of It: New and selected poems, 2010 | partner = Carol Adair (1978-2009†) | influences = Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost | influenced = | awards = United States Poet Laureate, 2008-2010 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, 2011 | signature = | website = | portaldisp = }} Kay Ryan (born September 21, 1945) is an American poet and educator. She has published 7 volumes of poetry and an anthology of selected and new poems. Ryan was the 16th United States Poet Laureate, from 2008 to 2010. Life Ryan was born in San Jose, California, and was raised in several areas of the San Joaquin Valley and the Mojave Desert. After attending Antelope Valley College, she received bachelor's and master's degrees in English from University of California, Los Angeles. Ryan received her B.A. in 1967 and her M.A. in 1968. Since 1971, she has lived in Marin co., California, and has taught English part-time at the College of Marin in Kentfield. Carol Adair, also an instructor at the College of Marin, was Ryan's partner from 1978 until Adair's death in 2009. Ryan's debut collection, Dragon Acts to Dragon Ends, was privately published in 1983 with the help of friends.Ryan told Richard Halstead (Marin Independent Journal, 2007) that, "There is a certain onus on publishing one's own book. So, I wasn't terribly proud to be doing that. It was the act of a desperate woman, and it did me not a shred of good." While she found a commercial publisher for her 2nd collection, Strangely Marked Metal (1985), her work went nearly unrecognized until the mid 1990s, when some of her poems were anthologized and the earliest reviews in national journals were published. She became widely recognized following her receipt of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2004, and published her 6th collection of poetry, The Niagara River, in 2005. Writing The Poetry Foundation's website has characterized Ryan's poems as follows: "Like Emily Dickinson and Marianne Moore before her, Ryan delights in quirks of logic and language and teases poetry out of the most unlikely places. She regards the 'rehabilitation of clichés,' for instance, as part of the poet’s mission. Characterized by subtle, surprising rhymes and nimble rhythms, her compact poems are charged with sly wit and off-beat wisdom." J.D. McClatchy included Ryan in his 2003 anthology of contemporary American poetry. He wrote in his introduction, "Her poems are compact, exhilarating, strange affairs, like Satie miniatures or Cornell boxes. ... There are poets who start with lived life, still damp with sorrow or uncertainty, and lead it towards ideas about life. And there are poets who begin with ideas and draw life in towards their speculations. Marianne Moore and May Swenson were this latter sort of artist; so is Kay Ryan. McClatchy included the following poems in this anthology: "Paired Things", "Mirage Oases", "A Cat/A Future", "The Old Cosmologists", "That Will to Divest", and "Drops in the Bucket". Ryan's poems are often quite short. In an early essay on Ryan, Dana Gioia wrote about this aspect of her poetry. "Ryan reminds us of the suggestive power of poetry – how it elicits and rewards the reader’s intellect, imagination, and emotions. I like to think that Ryan’s magnificently compressed poetry – along with the emergence of other new masters of the short poem like Timothy Murphy and H.L. Hix and the veteran maestri like Ted Kooser and Dick Davis – signals a return to concision and intensity." Many reviewers have noted an affinity between Ryan's poetry and Marianne Moore's. Katha Pollitt wrote that Ryan's 4th collection, Elephant Rocks (1997), is "Stevie Smith rewritten by William Blake" but that Say Uncle (2000) "is like a poetical offspring of George Herbert and the British comic poet Wendy Cope." Another reviewer of Say Uncle (2000) wrote of Ryan, "Her casual manner and nods to the wisdom tradition might endear her to fans of A.R. Ammons or link her distantly to Emily Dickinson. But her tight structures, odd rhymes and ethical judgments place her more firmly in the tradition of Marianne Moore and, latterly, Amy Clampitt." Ryan's wit, quirkiness, and slyness are often noted by reviewers of her poetry, but Jack Foley emphasizes her essential seriousness. In his review of Say Uncle he writes, "There is, in short, far more darkness than 'light' in this brilliant, limited volume. Kay Ryan is a serious poet writing serious poems, and she resides on a serious planet (a word she rhymes with 'had it'). Ryan can certainly be funny, but it is rarely without a sting." Some of these disjoint qualities in her work are illustrated by her poem "Outsider Art", which Harold Bloom selected for the anthology The Best of the Best American Poetry 1988-1997. Ryan is also known for her extensive use of internal rhyme. She refers to her specific methods of using internal rhyme as "recombinant rhyme." She claims that she had a hard time "taking end-rhyme seriously," and uses recombinant rhyme to bring structure and form to her work. As for other types of form, Ryan claims that she cannot use them, stating that it is "like wearing the wrong clothes." Recognition Ryan's awards include a 1995 award from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the 2000 Union League Poetry Prize, See also the Union League article. the 2001 Maurice English Poetry Award, a fellowship in 2001 from the National Endowment for the Arts, a 2004 Guggenheim Fellowship, and the 2004 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Her poems have been included in three Pushcart Prize anthologies, and have been selected 4 times for The Best American Poetry; "Outsider Art" was selected by Harold Bloom for The Best of the Best American Poetry 1988-1997. Since 2006, Ryan has served as a chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. In July 2008, the U.S. Library of Congress announced that Ryan would be the 16th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress for a 1-year term commencing in Autumn 2008. She succeeded Charles Simic. In April 2009, the Library announced that Ryan would serve a 2nd 1-year term extending through May 2010. She was succeeded by W.S. Merwin in June 2010. On January 22, 2011, Ryan was listed as a finalist for the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award, and on April 18, 2011, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, for her collection The Best of It: New and selected poems. http://www.pulitzer.org/works/2011-Poetry On September 20th, 2011, Ryan was awarded the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation MacArthur Fellows Program 'genius grant.' http://www.marinij.com/marinnews/ci_18931939 Publications * Dragon Acts to Dragon Ends. Fairfax, CA: Taylor Street Press, 1983. ISBN 0-91140700-6 * Strangely Marked Metal: Poems. Providence, RI: Copper Beech Press, 1985. ISBN 0-91427846-0 * Flamingo Watching: Poems. Providence, RI: Copper Beech Press, 1994. ISBN 0-91427864-9 * Elephant Rocks, New York: Grove Press, 1996. ISBN 0-80211586-1 * Say Uncle: Poems. New York: Grove Press, 2000. ISBN 0-80213717-2 * The Niagara River: Poems. New York: Grove Press, 2005 ISBN 0-80214222-2 * The Jam Jar Lifeboat, and other novelties exposed (illustrated by Carl Dern). Red Berry Editions, 2008. ISBN 978-0-98157811-8 * The Best of It: New and selected poems. New York: Grove Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-80211914-8 *''Odd Blocks: Selected and new poems''. Manchester, UK: Carcanet, 2011. ISBN 978 1-847771-30-8 *''Erratic Facts: Poems''. New York: Grove Press, 2015. ISBN 978-0-8021-2405-0 Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.Search results = au:Kay Ryan, WorldCat, OCLC Online Computer Library Center Inc. Web, Nov. 20, 2015. Audio / video *''An Evening with Billy Collins and Kay Ryan, February 15, 2006'' (eAudiobook). San Francisco: City Arts & Lectures, 2006. *''WCU Poetry Salon, Volume 1: Kay Ryan''. West Chester, PA: West Chester University Poetry Center, 2008. *''Interview with Kay Ryan, May 09, 2011'' (eAudiobook). San Francisco: City Arts & Lectures, 2011. *''Second Annual Morton Marcus Memorial Poetry Reading: Featuring Kay Ryan'' (CD). 2011. Except where noted, discographical information courtesy WorldCat. See also *LGBT poets * List of U.S. poets References External links ;Poems *Kay Ryan at Poetry 180: "Bad Day," "Turtle," "Dutch" *Kay Ryan b. 1945 at the Poetry Foundation *Kay Ryan profile & 8 poems at the Academy of American Poets *Kay Ryan at PoemHunter (8 poems) *Sixteen poems by Kay Ryan at Persimmon Tree ;Audio / video *Kay Ryan (b. 1945) at The Poetry Archive *Kay Ryan at YouTube *Audio: Kay Ryan reading at the 2010 Key West Literary Seminar (29:52) ;Books *Kay Ryan at Amazon.com ;About * *"Discovering Kay Ryan", essay by Dana Gioia. Originally published in The Dark Horse journal (No. 7, Winter 1998-99). * *[http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/05/books/05book.html review of The Best of It] by Dwight Garner in the New York Times.] Category:1945 births Category:Living people Category:Antelope Valley College alumni Category:American educators Category:American poets Category:20th-century poets Category:21st-century poets Category:American Poets Laureate Category:American women writers Category:Women poets Category:Lesbian writers Category:LGBT writers from the United States Category:People from San Jose, California Category:University of California, Los Angeles alumni Category:Guggenheim Fellows Category:Pulitzer Prize for Poetry winners Category:MacArthur Fellows Category:English-language poets Category:Poets Category:20th-century women writers Category:21st-century women writers Category:American academics Category:LGBT poets